Most pedestrian deaths aren't from speeding. They occur on high traffic roads where the posted limits are beyond what will most certainly be lethal (45mph+). And growing vehicle mass pushes lower speeds into the lethal range, anyway. (Someone's Yukon is going to kill pedestrians at much lower speeds than a Civic.)

Alcohol is involved nearly half the time as well...but the driver is intoxicated only 18% of the time. Usually it's drunk pedestrians stumbling into the road.

https://www.cdc.gov/pedestrian-bike-safety/about/pedestrian-...

Pedestrian fatalities are largely not a vehicle speed issue so much as a street design issue. Cities should be planned so nobody is ever walking near higher speed arterial roads, with crosswalks at controlled intersections, foot bridges over long/wide streets, and separated sidewalks. Then areas that need lower speeds (residential areas, downtown areas with street parking) should use narrower designs.

In contrast, the city I live in is primarily built around a handful of four lane streets that all of the businesses are along, with no crossings for miles and places where sidewalks randomly disappear. So you'll see pedestrians standing in the middle of a lane, waiting for a gap to run across the next two lanes. It's wildly dangerous, but the problem has nothing to do with people exceeding the speed limit...and even lowering it would achieve nothing.

Speed cameras or not, what you described will always happen. I would prefer no evil instead of a tiny evil however.

Likely yea, but with them at least some idiots too stupid to drive get some degree of punishment.

I don’t believe the juice (some speeding tickets) is worth the squeeze (surveillance dragnet covering the country).

In return for everyone giving up privacy.

I need a lot bigger of a return if I am going to give up privacy.

Most of you use a smartphone, you're already giving away most of your privacy...

And I get a lot in return

I don't think punishment benefits society in any way whatsoever.

I get where you're coming from here- I also don't see justice as an inherent good. If somebody kills somebody else, the death penalty will only increase the number of victims by one. It does nothing to undo the crime. Karma isn't real.

But you have to think about second order effects. The knowledge that you may be punished afterwards serves as a disincentive for doing the wrong thing now. It may be preferable to convince everyone that they would be punished without actually doing the punishment, but it's not possible. Apart from the death penalty, punishments also can directly teach an individual not to commit the crime again.

Justice is distinct from punishment. Someone who is wronged should be made whole, but I don't think society benefits from violating the violator.

Right, I just responded to that claim. Do you have any thoughts on the disincentivizing effects of punishment?

Or, if not, we can be more specific. Imprisonment means that an individual is separated from society, making it much harder for them to commit crimes. Most crime is done by young men, and time spent in prison contributes to age. Issuing a 10-year sentence means directly reducing the number of crimes that occur. Is that not beneficial to society?

Or if a CFO embezzles $10M, should society be indifferent to whether taxpayers make the company whole or the CFO does it?

It's the balance society needs for crime. If punishment doesn't benefit society what do we have to do with criminals in your opinion?

Many a local government is known to trap people with no good reason. Place a speed limit sign somewhere it's hard to spot from the road and the road does not indicate a speed limit by e.g. reducing lanes, place a few strategic cops and loot everyone who doesn't have a navigation system with speed hints.

Bonus, use the opportunity for some nice civil forfeiture scams.

They aren’t a tiny evil. It’s safetyism, and safetyism gets regularly abused to violate our rights. See age verification laws or online censorship for other examples. By promoting safety they get a way to conduct surveillance. And flock isn’t the only company in the surveillance game. How long before cameras and ALPRs for speeding end up being used by ICE to unconstitutionally round up people?

Regarding road safety: Many roads have artificially low speed limits to either generate revenue or appease anti car activists. But the benefit of cars, getting us quickly to our destinations, is very clear. Vehicle deaths are very rare, and getting to places quickly matters. I see this a lot on highways especially, where a low speed limit like 55-60 should really be 80.

We should be designing for faster, not slower, roads. Safety is always improving due to cars having all kinds of driver assistance features now anyways, but we also could just make roads support the speeds people want to drive at. And then the value of surveillance cameras for safety will also go away.

>Vehicle deaths are very rare, and getting to places quickly matters.

People not having any sort of empathy on HN shouldn't surprise me not gonna lie.

This is an ad hominem. It is a fact that road deaths are a small cost relative to the benefit of vehicles. If it weren’t, cars and trucks would be outright banned. Most people prefer to have them around, and prefer them to public transit if they can afford them and if infrastructure exists.

If you think even one death should mean the benefits don’t matter, then the only solution is to shut down all of society. There is risk everywhere. One death per 100 million miles is a small risk to most people.

But that doesn’t mean we are “not having any sort of empathy”.

by this logic we need body cams for every pen owner. Pens are class A weapons after all.